Rex Smith: Uneasy rests the crown on political heir

George Washington gets credit for underscoring the allergy to royalty in the new American nation by rejecting the suggestion that the president be referred to as “Your Excellency,” instead embracing the more democratic “Mr. President.”

But, of course, George and Martha Washington had no children. If they had, might egalitarianism have yielded to the typical parental desire to smooth a path for their offspring ? You can imagine Mount Vernon as an Americanesque Downton Abbey, conferring just a bit of nobility by bloodline. Our ancestors then might have been as enamored of their own little Prince George as Britons now are of theirs.

A Founding Father’s principles, though, are no match for the influence of today’s mass media, with its capacity to hoist to celebrity status the progeny of the powerful, or discard them with all the dignity accorded a rousted ruler’s fallen dauphin. Just now attention is focusing again on Chelsea Clinton, the first person to be the child of both a president and a member of a president’s Cabinet — or, some speculate, the child of both a once and a future president.

Chelsea has always been visible at the stage’s edge, but last week she came front and center with the announcement that she is pregnant. Headlines described the cause of all the attention as “American royalty,” a term usually reserved for Kennedys (not yet Kardashians too, thankfully).

But the announcement also brought out the anti-anything-Clinton crowd. Never mind that Chelsea is by all accounts both brilliant and hard-working, seemingly inheritor of only the admirable qualities of her parents. Ignore her obviously adoring husband, Mark Mezvinsky, a hedge fund manager, who understands the public spotlight as the son of two former members of Congress. No, the important thing is that she is Clinton, thus surely Clintonian, a political term meaning that she must be manipulative and ruthless (her dad lied about his sex life, you know, and her mom is a woman). So she’s eligible for a little bloodletting.

Rush Limbaugh, ever determined to set a new standard for incivility, suggested the pregnancy was cynically timed to allow Hillary Clinton to campaign for president as a doting grandma. Steve Malzberg, a lesser-known but similarly gaseous gabber, called the pregnancy “staged.”

The response to the idea of a Grandbubbababy suggests both the benefit and the peril of being a prominent political offspring in this country. We don’t bestow crowns and diadems on our rulers’ kids, but we do reserve the right to transfer our political biases from one generation to the next, and to be as rude to and about them as we seemingly figure we have a right to be toward anybody with the gall to offer themselves for public service.

Not that public figures should expect anonymity, nor do most want it. There are benefits to political celebrity. Fast Company, which positions itself as a hip business magazine, had the good fortune of having picked Chelsea as the cover subject of its current issue. Given the lead time for magazine covers, it was a stroke of luck in timing. “Chelsea Makes Her Move,” trumpeted the magazine cover, touting a mostly complimentary story about her current work (improving the performance of the wide-ranging Clinton Global Initiative) and background (bachelor’s from Stanford, graduate degrees from both Oxford and Columbia, an Oxford Ph.D. in public health in progress).

Read the piece and you come away with the conclusion that little Prince or Princess Clinton-Mezvinsky will be a lucky kid by virtue of great parental stock. Except that we’ll all be entitled to pass judgment, either favorably or not, depending on our political cast.

We don’t know if Chelsea will someday run for office. A lot of people go into their parents’ line of work, from Donald Trump to the Manning brothers, not to mention Julian and Sean Lennon, too many Bachs to name and Pliny the Younger, whoever he was other than not Pliny the Elder. But there’s a current in American politics that visits the father’s sins on the son, to borrow a phrase from Christian Scripture — which was voiced, by the way, to encourage mercy in place of vengeance.

Chelsea Clinton will be overshadowed by her parents for a long time to come, but you can hardly blame her if she tries to hold her place in the wings rather than at center stage.

If she and her baby are American royalty, maybe we’ve taken George Washington’s lesson a bit too far. Surely he didn’t envision replacing coronations with beheadings.